Umineko: Frustrating Ourselves For Fun

When I first read through this VN I was extremely invested in it as a piece of artwork and as a story. I immediately thought that I needed to write down all the thoughts that I was having about the text and the way I would position it conjunction to other postmodern works that I have also enjoyed.

After letting several months pass by thought I’m not sure that it is really worth writing about in the same way I thought I was going to. Notably this was my first ever experience with a visual novel, and I think it probably will be my last as well.

As someone who doesn’t read these kinds of things regularly, I’m not sure that the visual novel style really appeals to me. It also makes the act of reading much slower than if I was reading say a text or able to watch a film of this same dialogue. The format is just too long, and this in particular as gwern wrote in their review, was really in need of an editor.

If the text had been edited properly this could have trivially been 50 hours shorter. One of the key downfalls of this is that it treats the reader as if they are an idiot and repeats itself too many times when important things are happening.

This, and the tedious slice of life material, and overexplaining (which doesn’t really explain much of anything) pad out the running time of this heavily. If the author had allowed an editor to touch this, the length could have been significantly reduced without any damage to the story being done.

I say this as a person who loves extremely long films, some of my favorite films are 3-4 hours long and I have no issue with that. This clocks in at around 150-200 hours depending on the reader and you feel every last minute of those 150-200 hours.

I felt I had so much more to say when it was fresh on my mind. In many ways, the text reminds me a lot of House of Leaves but as a murder mystery instead of a horror story. The format of the first 4 episodes in particular is actively some of the best and more exciting material I’ve ever experienced.

The book was being played alongside a friend, with whom I actively engaged in a continual ongoing dialog about who we thought the culprit was at any given point in time. I was constantly interacting actively with the text and in a dialog with the text to try to solve the mystery as it was going.

Engaging with the text actively rather than as a passive reader is key to getting the most of out of the book. It is a continuous argument you are having with yourself and the text which is designed in such a way that it is always non-stop frustration.

Despite what some people might claim, there really isn’t enough information to solve the mystery given to you in the first 4 episodes at least. If I had known this going in I probably would have had a much worse time and would not have engaged with the text in such a vigorous way.

I’m not sure how I would have felt if I had known that the text wasn’t fair. While I was reading it I was told by the person I was reading it with that the text was fair and that I could solve the mystery on my own. I was told continually that other people had done it and therefore it was possible.

The claim that others have done this is dubious to say the least, I do not think that it is possible with the knowledge that is given to you in episodes 1-4 alone, to solve the mystery in a way that the reader is certain is correct.

Each of the episodes builds upon the last and by episode 4 I think you have enough information to make plausible guesses about the culprits, but there is not enough information to validate any given guess. There is not enough information given to know that you for sure found the correct answer or not.

In that sense, I think it is completely unsolvable without reading through the whole thing, even if you have a theory about the correct answer there is no way to validate it fully without looking to the material outside of episodes 1-4.

Even as I write this I’m not sure what I feel for this text. It is so endlessly frustrating and the use of forced perspectives without telling you that they are in fact forced perspectives is infuriating.

There are things that are forced perspectives that are wholly unfair in every way and which break what I would consider to be the rules of the genre on purpose. The sole reason these are broken is to make the mystery be that much more frustrating and to create a custom ruleset for how a given mystery should function.

It is fine for a mystery to not be fair in the same way most Sherlock Holmes stories are not fair. I like those stories all the same even though most of the time it isn’t possible to independently solve them for yourself. Here the metatextual nature of the narrative is kind of forcing you to attempt to solve things that are basically unsolvable.

With a simple Sherlock Holmes story you are just along for the ride and are not really expected to try to solve it. Here we go up one meta-layer and watch someone (who is very bad at solving mysteries) try to solve something unsolvable. We are actively encouraged to follow along and try to solve what the main character is incapable of solving, only to be incapable ourselves.

It isn’t clear at least to me, if the author renders all of this unfair to prevent the reader from discovering the truth too early or if there is some greater meaning behind the unfairness. As of writing this I have not fully finished all of episode 8 so maybe there is something more to the unfairness that I am missing.

To be absolutely clear about what I’m saying, my claim is that there is no ability to do a fully deductive proof based on the information provided as it is presented in parts 1-4. The truth is so fully obfuscated from the reader in a way that is wholly unfair that the experience is painful to go through.

Some of the aspects that they provide for you in the story simply cheapen the validity of the overall story and its composition. The things which are introduced about Nanjo in particular are annoying.

The fact that we can’t trust any body he ever examines as being dead when he declares that they are is annoying. These elements are sprinkled in throughout and are simply cheap tricks to frustrate any attempts to solve the mystery before the authors allows us to.

Half of the time we see something quite literally happen on the screen that isn’t an overt act of ‘magic’ within the framing of the story but these clues are almost all complete fabrications and lies. There is no way until later on to accurately guess which clues are genuine, vs those that aren’t.

Even more frustrating is that I’m not sure if the rules as they have been later stated are valid for the first portions of the text. There are rules which evolve later which I would swear do not apply to prior portions of the text. There are also character traits which, at least in my memory of the earlier episodes, are not faithfully followed even from the perspectives which are supposed to be objective.